Sarah Phillips is a Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002, her M.A. in Anthropology from the same institution in 1998, and her B.A. in Anthropology and Russian from Wake Forest University in 1993. Phillips has conducted anthropological research in Ukraine since 1995, examining the variable effects of socialist collapse on people’s lives, particularly in terms of gender formations, health, social inequalities, social justice, and changing citizen-state relations. Her research specializations include medical anthropology, disability studies, gender studies, HIV-AIDS, addiction, Chernobyl, civil society and non-governmental organizations, development, Cold War studies, and cultural and literary diplomacy, with a geographical focus on Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union especially Ukraine and Russia, and the U.S.

Major areas of her inquiry encompass the health and symbolic fallout of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the role of women in Ukraine’s civil society, the Ukrainian disability rights movement, and service provision for people who use drugs and people living with HIV, especially women. Current projects include disability and inclusion in Ukraine during Russia’s war in collaboration with Hanna Zaremba-Kosovych; the history of disability rights for people with intellectual disabilities from the 1980s to the present; Ukrainian war refugees with disabilities in EU countries; and a book on Kurt Vonnegut’s resonance in the Soviet Union tentatively titled Kurt Vonnegut in the USSR. Phillips authored Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine (2010) and Women's Social Activism in the New Ukraine: Development and the Politics of Differentiation (2008). Key recent publications feature “Disability studies in war and care” (2024), “Women’s agency and resistance in Russia’s war on Ukraine” (2023), “Moral Economies of Care and Women Who Use Drugs in Ukraine” (2023), and “HIV prevention, precarity, and fragmented landscapes of service provision in Ukraine” (2017). She coordinates the IU-Ukraine Nonresidential Scholars Program.

Professional Email: sadphill@iu.edu